The One Year Marker

I’ve recently had a few complaints about the lack of updates on my blog. I apologize and considering winter is about to start up again in the Rhodopes, I’m sure there’ll be more frequent updates.

In the past couple of months I’ve had some of my hardest times yet and some of my best. Great things that happened are that my mother and sister came to visit! My mother came to Bulgaria and got to see life through my eyes for a week. It definitely helped her understand a lot more about my village and I can genuinely say she had a good time despite the fact that the overall theme for the week was physical injury. My mother ended up with a black toe, a bruised heel, getting sick at her stomach for about a day and in the end we had to make a trip to the hospital to have her arm stitched up! She recovered quickly from everything and stayed in good spirits, but it just got kinda ridiculous towards the end of the week! After a week in Bulgaria, my sister joined us for a week in Istanbul! Istanbul is fantastic! I encourage everyone to go at least once! We didn’t have any problems with the Turkish people (most of them even hit on my married sister-but not in a scary way, in a funny way), there is soooo much to see there, and our hotel was awesome and inexpensive! If you ever need advice about going to Istanbul, just email me!

I also passed the one year mark in Bulgaria at the end of July! I couldn’t believe I’d already been here for a year! It went by so fast! I still have about 13 months left here, but I know they’ll pass in the blink of an eye.

In my last post I wrote about how our mayor’s office had received funding for a project that we wrote to build a children’s playground. I’m happy to say that we are almost finished! It has been a rough process and for a while there I thought we would never finish. But the past month we’ve made a lot of progress and I’m excited about the end result. All the playground equipment and the fence are bright colors and it just makes me cheery to look at it! The kids are excited and already play there even though we aren’t finished, and we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from parents and other adults in the village. I’m really proud of the project and so happy that it will be here for many years after I’ve gone.

There’ve also been some harder times. During the summer work slows down a lot in general for most volunteers and, in my village, everyone concentrates more on planting and gathering hay (which I did-not the funnest thing to do!). After the school year ended my work load drastically declined and the days here slowed down to millenniums! That was a bit rough. But luckily my work has picked up again and we start school in about two weeks.

In about a month we will have our mid-service conference for Peace Corps (because they count your time from when you arrive at your site as an official volunteer, which was in October), and I can’t wait to see all of the volunteers together again and to look forward to the second year here in Bulgaria!